#Nature
#Climate
#Science

MacKenzie and his colleagues have sent this quiet forest just outside Birmingham into the future – in a manner of speaking. They have pumped carbon dioxide (CO2) around the mature oak trees here in order to simulate the atmosphere that is expected to swathe planet Earth by the year 2050.

MacKenzie and his colleagues have been running their experiment for seven years to date, and the results have surprised them. Contrary to some previous analyses, their study suggests that trees can actually absorb more carbon as they age. It's a finding that highlights the immense importance of mature, temperate forests in terms of climate regulation.

What's more, for the first time, MacKenzie and his fellow forest-watchers have also shown that microscopic organisms living on these trees capture methane, another greenhouse gas harmful to the atmosphere. "[We] found the trees are providing another unexpected service for us," says MacKenzie. "The canopy hosts microbes, and these microbes eat the methane. There are lots of reasons to nurture forests.

The findings from Staffordshire indicate trees take up around 25 to 50 million tonnes of atmospheric methane each year, making them 7-12% better for climate than they are currently credited for.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250120-experimental-forests-reveal-the-ways-trees-help-cool-the-climate

What happened to Greta Thunberg?
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As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. In following the science, Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to get down to the root of the climate crisis.

But Greta kept going. When she published The Climate Book in 2022, the then 19-year-old activist had some words for the entire system we live under today:

"We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the Global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”

That was two years ago, and it’s no surprise she hasn’t been given the spotlight nearly as often since. In fact, in the wake of that book launch, she’s been the subject of countless hit pieces, and her Palestine solidarity activism has been denigrated as well.

Greta went from a cute kid saying that climate change is bad to a young adult rightly charging global systems with not only fueling the climate crisis but also being oppressive and grossly harmful to life in numerous other ways. And, perhaps most importantly, she sees these systems as interconnected and knows that radical change is necessary for the future of life on this planet.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://www.jphilll.com/p/gretas-growth

#Politics #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange

A thought-provoking article published in Nature asserts that: "Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more-equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than are those in unequal, consumer-driven ones."

Here is a short excerpt...
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As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich.

Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity.

Evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility, and public trust. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway. Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.

Many commentators have drawn attention to the environmental need to limit economic growth and instead prioritize sustainability and well-being. We argue that tackling inequality is the foremost task of that transformation. Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00723-3

#Economics #Inequality #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

More horrid news - #SaudiArabia is driving a huge #global investment plan to create demand for its #oil and #gas in developing countries, an undercover investigation has revealed. Critics said the plan was designed to get countries “hooked on its harmful products”."

Jut like #tobacco, no? (I am personally hooked on tobacco, so I know what I'm talking about)

Little was known about the oil demand sustainability programme ( #ODSP ) but the investigation obtained detailed information on plans to drive up the use of #FossilFuel - powered cars, buses and planes in #Africa and elsewhere, as #rich countries increasingly switch to clean energy.

The #ODSP plans to accelerate the development of supersonic air travel, which it notes uses three times more jet fuel than conventional planes, and partner with a carmaker to mass produce a cheap combustion engine vehicle. Further plans promote power ships, which use polluting heavy fuel oil or gas to provide electricity to coastal communities.

The ODSP is overseen by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, the crown prince Mohammed bin #Salman, and involves its biggest organisations, such as the $700bn Public Investment Fund, the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, the petrochemicals firm Sabic, and the government’s most important ministries.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/revealed-saudi-arabia-plan-poor-countries-oil

#Climate #Klima #ClimateCrisis #Klimakrise #Cop28 #Cop28UAE #ClimateEmergency #ClimateDisaster #ClimateDiary @pvonhellermannn

Here is a somewhat comical but also highly indignant commentary about the folly of “Net Zero by 2050”…
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We insiders — by which I mean anyone paying attention — know that the plan to mitigate the climate catastrophe with Net Zero by 2050 is complete bullshit. But maybe you’ve absorbed that knowledge without really understanding why. So let’s talk about it.

What does Net Zero actually mean? Net Zero is the point at which the CO2 burden in the atmosphere is no longer increasing. We’re still putting some up, but we’re also taking just as much out.

This definition immediately tips off two major problems.

The “still putting some up” part is a major issue because the fossil fuels industrial/political complex hears that and stops listening. The “still putting some up” part is their job, and somebody else can do the “take just as much out” part.

In other words, it's Business As Usual for fossil fuels, including continuing growth. Someone else can do the preserving-life-and-the-climate part.

The second obvious problem with Net Zero is the very idea of “taking just as much CO2 out of the atmosphere each year as the fossil fuel industry is adding to it each year.” We know of only two ways to reduce the CO2 load of the atmosphere. One is time. But CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so time is not on our side.

The other way to reduce CO2 is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon is “captured” from the atmosphere using a chemical solvent that absorbs CO2, after which it can be buried in the ground where the CO2 will stay safely out of the atmosphere virtually forever.

CCS technology both does and does not exist.

CCS does exist in that there are many ingenious systems for doing it, including several pilot programs demonstrating direct air capture, the holy grail of CCS. Many fossil fuelled electricity generation plants have been removing CO2 from their smokestack emissions for decades. Unfortunately, much of the currently captured CO2 is being injected into played-out oil wells, forcing more of the remaining oil to be recoverable, to burn as fuel. Totally self-defeating, as far as reducing the CO2 load in the atmosphere.

But CCS also does NOT exist in terms of a significant contributor to Net Zero. They remove so little CO2 from the atmosphere, and at such a cost, as to make them completely impractical. To make a dent in carbon emissions, hundreds of thousands of CCS plants are needed, if not millions. The cost is prohibitive. Not to mention the carbon costs of manufacturing all those plants.

But surely CCS technology will improve over the next decade or two. Maybe someone will even find a miraculous breakthrough that will make it truly practical?

Sorry, but no. It’s not that there hasn’t been enough research into CCS. It has been heavily researched and the science is known. It’s actually some pretty simple chemistry. We can tweak around the efficiency edges, but there are no breakthroughs waiting in the wings to be discovered.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://lannierose.medium.com/net-zero-by-2050-get-the-joke-946c2d0c0530

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
#CO2 #Emissions

It can be argued that electric vehicles are an improvement when replacing ICE vehicles.

But that misses a much bigger point — which is that the very best car is *not* an electric car. The very best car is no car at all!

Building electric cars requires massive use of fossil fuels, including petrochemicals for the manufacture of plastics. In addition, mining of lithium for batteries as well as trawling for other minerals in the deep ocean is environmentally disastrous, killing biodiversity while polluting our water, soil, and air.

LITHIUM EXTRACTION — https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future

DEEP-SEA MINING — https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/109814016209990908

The kind of “Green Growth” championed by capitalists and politicians, which features more electric cars, a bit of solar, and a few wind farms — along with continued use of fossil fuels — is not a good answer. It does not solve any of our problems, and in fact only makes them worse.

Say NO to more cars, of any kind. Push instead for active transportation and for improved public transit.

Continued economic growth is unsustainable. Period. The only logical choice for us and for the biosphere is de-growth.

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency #Degrowth #WarOnCars #BanCars